April 18, 2013

I have noticed the phenomenon in my daughters and their friends: Highly educated women from elite schools who decide to take a break from their careers to stay home and raise their small children. Joni Hersch, a professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt, has put numbers to these anecdotes with a research paper entitled “Opting Out among Women with Elite Education.” It is a fascinating new window onto the development of the new upper class that I described in Coming Apart.

Hersch uses a large database, the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, that lets her identify 1,830 women who graduated from “tier 1” educational institutions — in effect, the Ivies and other high-prestige universities like Duke and Stanford — and compare them with women who graduated from less elite schools. When women with and without children of all ages are lumped together, the graduates of tier 1 schools are employed only slightly less often than their less privileged sisters. But as soon as Hersh separates out women with children from those without, it becomes obvious that women from tier 1 schools are significantly more likely to be home with the kids than the others — 68% of mothers from the tier 1 schools were employed, compared to 76% of those from the other schools.

Subtracting from 100%, that's 32% of tier 1 moms versus 24% of moms who are graudates of less prestigious, or 1/3rd more.

A lot depends on the kind of degree that a married woman with children has obtained. If she is a physician, has a PhD, or has an MA in education (i.e., is probably a K-12 teacher), she is as likely to be employed as graduates from lower-tier schools. But those degrees involve only 24% of mothers who graduated from tier 1 schools. Those with law degrees are 9 percentage points less likely to be employed than graduates from lower-tier schools; those with MBAs are 16 percentage points less likely to be employed, and the largest single group, those with just a BA, are 13 percentage points less likely to be employed.

Something I noticed when my son won a scholarship to a fine high school in the Pasadena area: among students' mothers who had elite MBAs, the moms tended to still be working if they had superstar jobs (like CFO of a major division at Disney), but if they had been merely senior vice presidents and their husbands were doing well, they often would pack it in career-wise. So, the school would have utracompetent volunteer moms with Dartmouth MBAs and investment banking experience running refreshment stands at school events. Nothing ever went wrong at that school.

These numbers shouldn’t make sense. Who gets into tier 1 schools? Not just highly able women, but also women who are ambitious enough to want to be in those schools. It is plausible that they would be more likely, not less, to continue their careers after they have children than women who, on average, are surely less intellectually able and probably less intensely ambitious than the tier 1 women.

Hersch also documents that women from tier 1 schools are more likely than other women graduates to have parents with college educations and to be married to men holding jobs that require a college education.

Or, husbands who are just highly successful in general. Similarly, at the high school in Sherman Oaks where my other son went, some mothers, like Pam Dawber and Moira Harris, were largely retired from their careers to be housewives focused on their children so that their husbands, Mark Harmon and Gary Sinise, respectively, could concentrate fully on battling each other for first place in the Nielsen ratings.

Add to that some other characteristics of women who have graduated from elite schools that Hersch does not address but are established by other sources: Those with children are almost always married. They are not only married to men with college educations, they are likely to be married to men who have also graduated from elite schools. Their family incomes are likely to be high. They tend to live in places with the best schools (or send their children to the best schools).

As Kingsley Amis noted in Lucky Jim, there's no end to the way nice things are nicer than not nice things.

"Some mothers, like Pam Dawber and Moira Harris, were largely retired from their careers to be housewives focused on their children so that their husbands, Mark Harmon and Gary Sinise, respectively, could concentrate fully on battling each other for first place in the Nielsen ratings."

God, yes. I went to a top 7 law school. Facebook time from 88 hour per week associate to new mom for the girl lawyers 3-5 years. They worked darn hard until they met the corporate VP or neurologist. Then it was mom mode. 100% chance at least one of them will file suit in 10 years when youngest child enters high school and they are ready to be partner, and firm offers to the men who have been working 90 hour weeks for the last 15 years.

I graduated from MIT and got a grad degree from Cal. I took forever to realize that I was never going to be a Nobel prize winning prof, but eventually saw the light. I realized men and women are not alike, that I didn't code or solve math puzzles for fun in my spare time, that I had absolutely no ambition, and that we could live nicely on my ivy league husband's west coast salary in the midwest, where I then became happy as house wife and mother, quitting as soon as kid #1 came, and now we have 3 awesome boys. Oh, and we got religion and joined the Church.(I am an hbder and happy to condemn single motherhood and many working mothers too.)

The kids go to private school, I plan life in the household, manage things so husband can work as necessary, and with my spare time, I started a nonprofit to help teachers teach better science and math.

It took about 5 years and 2 grandsons before my baby boomer mother could stop complaining about the money she wasted on my degree. After years of me pointing out that the grandsons were due to it, she has forgiven me.

I graduated from an elite college and have stayed home since I had kids. I never wanted to do anything differently. I often wonder what the girls who graduated with me ended up doing re their kids.

I have a childhood friend who attended an elite law school. Unlike me she never envisioned herself staying home and was quite the ball breaker career woman. Until she had kids. She never went back to work and is still at home a decade later.

I don't think some women fully understand the magnitude of handing your three month old over to someone else until faced with the reality of it. Maybe these women are more likely to have husbands who can earn enough to carry the household. Or maybe they're just smarter and more forward thinking.

You mean that among the few women who can choose to do anything they want and can afford whatever arrangements are necessary to accommodate those choices, a disproportionate number of them choose to have babies and stay home to raise them?

"Highly able and ambitious" just can't compete with the draw a baby has on mom. Babies are good at convincing mom to stick around. And moms often find their babies endlessly fascinating. Evolution made it turn out that way. A half century of social conditioning won't wipe that out. The richer moms can afford to go with the feeling and stay home. I think most women would if they could afford it.

Women who graduated from elite colleges are likely to have elite husbands who make enough money on their own to sustain the whole household and brood. Women who graduated from "lesser" schools have "lesser" husbands who don't make enough to sustain the whole household and brood, so she has to work.

"Facebook time from 88 hour per week associate to new mom for the girl lawyers 3-5 years.

Does this sentence make sense to anybody?"

It is illustrative of the cognitive decline due to overworking. I'm always suspicious of claims that would provoke me to commit suicide. . I'm a blue collar guy who got a couple of tough-guy fat bosses who claim superhuman stamina. I avoid them like the plague, but I did stay with them for an overnight job to see them in action. They were both sleeping two hours after the job started, we did just fine without them. Like all high-earners, they are blind to their hypocrisy.

Its the quality of men. Get an A-lister for a husband, you'll stay home as a mom no matter how high your ambitions are as a woman.

Get nothing but mid level, mediocre, beta male losers as husband material, you might as a woman in desperation marry him. But you won't want to stay home. And can't afford it anyway.

The wives of A-listers can afford nannies and such, European royalty and aristocracy did this routinely. If you have money you can have some illiterate Central American nanny raise your kids. But if you scored say Warren Beatty as husband, why would you?

And that is the whole point of the elite. Empowering the hottest women to nab that uber-Alpha male, and allow the Alpha Male to do nearly as he pleases.

Translating 4/18 at 6:21 - "Facebook time" equals, in English, "based on observations I have made through the sample of people I have kept up with - through the relevant period of time - on Facebook""from 88 hours per week associate to new mom for the girl lawyers 3-5 years" equals "on average, the length of time between the realization that success as a striving lawyer requires 88 hours per week to the time when the woman who has realized this has found a fertile husband and given birth is three to five years." Personally, I try to be a Book of Proverbs type of human being, and this post (read in the best possible light) hits on several of the themes Solomon wrote about therein - the blessings of children, the foolishness of wasting time in the pursuit of anything but what the Lord approves of, the wrongness offrivolous competition. Its a short book, you can find these themes easily.

That's all happened in my household. We're maybe weirdly non-ambitious for people like us. But I must say, it's pretty pleasant--for everyone involved, as far as I can tell. Check back in fifteen years or so...

Went to a US News Tier 1 school. Worked in engineering for over a decade - met my fellow Tier 1 husband at work - and quit when pregnant with son #3. Stay at home moms like us don't "watch Oprah all day" (god, that's for the brain dead) - we shuttle our children to playgroup and other enriching activities. When they start school we volunteer in and fundraise for our schools and community. I also have a blog with a pretty big following.

When I suggest that, just as an investment proposition, taxpayers -- who fund the two public universities where she spent the most time -- did not get a great return for the money spent on her education, she bristles. Go figure.

"I understood that my job was no longer to force the party line upon Quinn," he writes. "My job was to validate her feelings." His wife, who used to look up to him as a glamorous writer, begins to view him as an "unreliable employee."

""Home Game" ends with Mr. Lewis's description of getting a vasectomy -- at the request of his wife, naturally. Having submitted to metaphorical castration, he decides to go the whole nine yards. "

Middle-aged vet said,"Personally, I try to be a Book of Proverbs type of human being, and this post (read in the best possible light) hits on several of the themes Solomon wrote about therein - the blessings of children, the foolishness of wasting time in the pursuit of anything but what the Lord approves of, the wrongness offrivolous competition. Its a short book, you can find these themes easily."****I like that :)**************************

Alice,You very much remind me of my cousin and his wife, but I suspect she is FAR more involved in her nonprofit and I was just worrying about my cousin the past couple of days because of it. They both graduated from Harvard and he is a very genteel type who is easy going who would never make a fuss, but she's become a minor celebrity, notable enough to have a wikipedia page and be interviewed on camera as well as at HuffPo, and other papers (not risking an outing). He works, makes great money, but doesn't stand out. Her celebrity has grown even more, recently, so I worry.

The other part of your comment reminds me of my gifted daughter, as you must be highly gifted to have gone to MIT. She's great at math, but hates it. Just today, I guess because she's almost done with Algebra II and will be starting trig next week (she's 12), I thought I'd ask her how she felt about math to see if her feelings had changed. "It's terrible!" was what she had to say, even though she is an A and B student.I've always told her college is for her to find someone for whom to be a helpmeet; feminists will be aghast, but she loves this idea.

My story is that I never expected to have a real career. Plenty of smart kids hang out in grad school to postpone the real world, why shouldn't people whose idea of the real world is being a stay at home mom do it too?

"Who gets into tier 1 schools? Not just highly able women, but also women who are ambitious enough to want to be in those schools."

This is something that all these type articles get wrong. There's no need to assume that women who go to tier 1 schools were ever ambitious. It's not like this is 1950 and women who want to go to grad school have to bust through tons of disapproval from society. These days, if you're smart enough to go to a top school, everyone has been pushing you to go since you were five. It would take more strength of will not to go. And once you've decided to go to graduate school, why not go to the best school that will take you?

In fact, I'd expect that women at lower tier schools have more ambitious personality types, since they're more likely to be relying on their work ethic to slog through school, rather than just painlessly coasting on natural ability.

As for whether it's a waste of resources for the Future Mothers of America to be filling up Ivy League programs, I would say no. How many programs can find jobs for all their graduates? MD's maybe, but that's it. You need a certain critical mass of students to run a serious program, and for most programs the size of this critical mass is bigger than the number of job openings after graduation. Women who are part of that critical mass but are not seriously interested in a job are a godsend.

Who gets into tier 1 schools? Not just highly able women, but also women who are ambitious enough to want to be in those schools.

Ambitious people want status and sadly even in the 21st century, most women can achieve far more status through marriage than through their own achievements. Look at Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. And since a woman's status is judged as much by her husband's achievements as her own, she might as well just hitch herself to a rich or powerful man. If you can't beat them, join them.

I remember my Mother being asked, during the height of Women's Lib hysteria in the early '70's, if she worked. Her reply was "No, my husband makes enough money that I don't have to". ( The question was from a feminist type). We lived in a very large house with multiple servants at the time. The fantasy that most women wanted to work as opposed to being stay at home Moms was being ferociously rammed down everyone's throats. Most working women have jobs, not careers. I remember a Stanford MBA chick I knew in the mid-80's in Manhattan. She was getting married and not planning on using her MBA - a very hot degree from a very hot school at the time. I remember thinking how foolish it was for our county to be pushing women to use the scarce resource if a Stanford MBA slot on a woman who would drop out and make babies ( I am by nature extraordinarily un-PC). Of course, thus was before we started wholesale importation of H1 B's. The ideas of a society are always the ideas of its ruling class. Feminism, as an extremely destructive meme, is so self-evidently at war with human nature that it must serve some deeper purpose to our elite- beyond merely being an intellectual salve for physically unattractive smart Jewish women.

Ummm, this study finds that 68 percent of "Tier 1" moms work -- in other words, the vast majority of Ivy League moms do NOT choose to stay at home, they choose to work. Hard to tell if that's because of economic pressure (not all Ivy grads are rich) or the desire to work. I'd be curious to see a breakout by husband's income. But anyway the stats in this post certainly do not prove that most women are naturally disposed to stay at home. More the reverse.

Me, too. Went to a 7 Sisters school in the 70s and knew only a handful of people who were either married or unofficially committed to a significant other upon graduation. Everyone else went to grad school or started to work in their chosen career path. My eventual career was one where everyone was presumed to be ferociously committed to being top dog. When forcibly confronted with this, I would emphatically state that I wasn't interested in becoming "x." When my inquisitor demanded to know my ultimate goal, I demurred (they wouldn't have believed me, anyhow).

Guys I met were shocked and pleased to find I that I had zero desire to be Ms. Powerful Career Woman and I wanted marriage and motherhood. My husband did not go to a tier 1 school but had the equivalent career, and we agreed I'd be the stay at home mom/supportive wife from the get go.

I get tired of doing the dishes, at times, but otherwise no regrets.

I've had no contact with my fellow grads for years (specifically had them remove my name from the mailing list from both undergrad and grad schools).

"Any lazy person can get into a low tier school. You have to work your head off to get into the Ivy League."

Is this true? My understanding is that if you have a logical mind, the LSAT isn't something you need to study too hard for. And I've also been told that law schools just care about GPA, they don't care at all how hard your major was. Where does the hard work come in?

Is this true? My understanding is that if you have a logical mind, the LSAT isn't something you need to study too hard for. And I've also been told that law schools just care about GPA, they don't care at all how hard your major was. Where does the hard work come in?

Getting a high GPA in any major takes hard work. You have to attend class, listen to long boring lectures, read long boring books, type long boring essays.

Unless you're studying a really abstract subject like physics (which very few Ivy League women can competently handle in my experience) getting into a good school is all about hard work, with IQ playing only a minor role.

Getting a high GPA in any major takes hard work. You have to attend class, listen to long boring lectures, read long boring books, type long boring essays.

Boring != hard. It may be work by definition if you don't feel like doing it; but if you're one of the smartest people in the classroom, the work won't be particularly hard, whether you're in first grade or graduate school.

Not if you're smart enough. I spent about 4 or 5 hours a week on homework and received admission offers from both the Ivies I applied to (Princeton and Brown).

4 to 5 hours a week in addition to all the hours you spent in class? That's a lot; even Asians don't study that much. In addition you probably spent countless hours doing all your little sports and clubs that Princeton values.

Ivy League students who get in on their own (without help from parents) are the hardest working people you can ever imagine. And there is no "smart enough". Top schools routinely reject kids with perfect SAT scores.

"I remember my Mother being asked, during the height of Women's Lib hysteria in the early '70's, if she worked. Her reply was "No, my husband makes enough money that I don't have to". ( The question was from a feminist type). We lived in a very large house with multiple servants at the time. The fantasy that most women wanted to work as opposed to being stay at home Moms was being ferociously rammed down everyone's throats. Most working women have jobs, not careers. I remember a Stanford MBA chick I knew in the mid-80's in Manhattan. She was getting married and not planning on using her MBA - a very hot degree from a very hot school at the time. I remember thinking how foolish it was for our county to be pushing women to use the scarce resource if a Stanford MBA slot on a woman who would drop out and make babies ( I am by nature extraordinarily un-PC). Of course, thus was before we started wholesale importation of H1 B's. The ideas of a society are always the ideas of its ruling class. Feminism, as an extremely destructive meme, is so self-evidently at war with human nature that it must serve some deeper purpose to our elite- beyond merely being an intellectual salve for physically unattractive smart Jewish women. "

Well gag me with spoon. I wonder how your mom's servants' kids were doing? Did your household include a daycare facility for them?I am fully cognizant of the damage done by unreasonable "feminism", and I think mothers should stay home if they can, for the first few years. But salaries and employment opportunities were more limited in the 50s and 60s, than most readers here could imagine. SOmetimes it was valid--a salesman with mechanical knowledge of appliances is worth more than someone just selling clothes. I get that. But when a HR person openly admitted that the men in retail got paid more because they "had families to support" -- well. I knew she was just giving the party line. Most guys in retail wherever I worked were gay and selling clothes. Whoever they were supporting had nothing to do with "families" as imagined by HR.The "feminist" movement and the "civil rights" movement, had their valid points, but they have been addressed for the most part. Since then they've been using cannonfire to kill canaries.Don't get too excited about the nearly-rich ladies who stay home with the kids. The completely rich dads usually do to, when they feel like it. It's what people do when they are not fueled by desperation for money to live on.

Surprisingly hostile reactions to this phenomenon among iSteve readers: these women are wasting taxpayer dollars, they get to stay home and watch Oprah all day, etc. Your commenters seem to be confusing being anti-feminist with being against anything good for women. We want intelligent women to be staying at home; that's a good thing. (It's not an easy thing, either: raising children is hard work, and women who devote their lives to it deserve our respect. Leave the scorn for stay-at-home moms to leftist feminists.) I'm happy for my taxpayer dollars to be funding intelligent men and women to meet in college and procreate. And I doubt that what they're learning in class is going to waste for the women much more than the men (or the working women). What they learn in school is often not that applicable to the workplace, and it's sometimes applicable to life in general or to raising children as well, as well as to nonprofit work that many stay-at-home moms take part in.

I also doubt these are hypocritical liberal Democrats. As Steve's observed, marriage is one of the best predictors of political affiliation. I would guess the majority of these women are Republicans.

To end up on some general conclusions advocating that tier 1 education for women leads more likely to housewife and mother-nursing responsibilities during a period in their lifes doesn't make any sense.

The two sets of data are totally unrelated so no comparison can be made other that a woman can be well educated and a mother in her lifetime.

It is easier to abandon a career for good or retreate for a period of time when you can afford it and have this option available.

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